Poor vision can not only impair the way you see and experience the world around you, but can be quite expensive to treat, with regular checkups with your optometrist to constantly fit you with glasses and/or contacts that match your latest prescription. But laser eye surgery has the ability to change all that – provided you don't have any health conditions that would prevent it from being effective. So if you want to know what conditions may cause problems for you as a candidate for laser eye surgery, then here's what you need to know.
Autoimmune Disorders
Certain diseases and disorders can attack your immune system and impair your ability to heal, making you a poor candidate for laser eye surgery. These conditions include HIV, AIDS, multiple sclerosis (MS), lupus, and rheumatoid arthritis. However, it's not just diseases that fall under the autoimmune banner that can cause problems. Diabetes (which is much more common than any of the above diseases; in 2012 statistics showed with nearly 30 million people in the United States alone have some form of it) can also stop you from healing as quickly, normally, or as well as other people, and can thus disqualify you from being a candidate for laser eye surgery.
Eye Conditions
Laser eye surgery can correct nearsightedness, farsightedness, and other vision peculiarities – but there are a few it can't touch, and those can disqualify you or cause your surgeon to have to personalize your treatment in the extreme. Conditions such as amblyopia (commonly known as lazy eye) and strabismus (definition) should be mentioned to your doctor so that they can make the call of whether or not your qualify, while other, more common conditions such as cataracts or glaucoma can disqualify you completely.
You're Expecting
Being pregnant causes all sorts of weird and wonderful changes in your body – but those same hormone changes that allow you to produce milk and to forget about the worst parts of labor can also prevent you from getting laser eye surgery. This is because your hormones can actually affect how stable your prescription is, making your vision shift slightly over your pregnancy. Even after you give birth, nursing continues these hormonal changes throughout your body, making you a poor candidate. The good news is that neither pregnancy nor nursing last forever; as long as you're three menstrual periods past your last date of nursing, you won't have to worry about being disqualified for lasik surgery anymore.
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